Recognizing the Attachment to Jealousy and Competition

By Wen Zhu

2009-06-14

Teacher said in Zhuan Falun,"The issue of jealousy is very serious as it directly involves the matter of whether you can complete cultivation practice. If jealousy is not abolished, everything that you have cultivated will become fragile. There is this rule: If in the course of cultivation practice jealousy is not given up, one will not attain Right Fruit--absolutely not. Perhaps you have heard before that Buddha Amitabha spoke of going to a paradise with karma. But that is not going to happen without giving up jealousy. It may be possible that one falls short in some other minor regards and goes to the paradise with karma for further cultivation. But it is absolutely impossible if jealousy is not abandoned."

I was persecuted in a forced labour camp for two years while I was in Mainland China, and practitioners wrote articles about it and posted them on the Minghui website. I therefore planned to apply for asylum in another country. But one practitioner said to me, "What have you done since you got here? Are applying for a visa and finding a job all you can think about? Wait a while and see what happens." I was very upset and thought, "This person has such a strong attachment to jealousy. Some people can forge a document that says they served a forced labour term. But the articles on Minghui prove that I have been persecuted. I'm qualified to apply for asylum in Australia. This meets the requirements of the Australian government. Why does a fellow practitioner think that this is not right and even challenge me about it? Don't the old forces use jealousy to test Dafa practitioners? Why is this fellow practitioner siding with the old forces?"

The fellow practitioner's words affected me in this way because obtaining a legal Australian immigration status was important to me. Afterwards, I realized that I had started resenting this practitioner. I also realized that in my cultivation, I had been neglecting to eliminate my attachment to jealousy.

Jealousy was so deeply ingrained in me, I had become accustomed to it. As a result, it was very difficult for me to detect it.

While I was in China, I worked as the treasurer for a company, and the company's accountant sat across from me. We both knew every employee's salary. The accountant constantly asked, "Why does so-and-so deserve to make that much money?" This usually did not bother me, and so I did not feel that I was jealous. But one time she brought my salary into the discussion: "So-and-so constantly skips work, yet the two of you are making the same amount of money. Is this reasonable?" This time I found her words unsettling, and I felt wronged. Still, I did not realize that I felt this way out of jealousy.After coming to Australia, I delivered the Epoch Times newspaper with fellow practitioners, and I unconsciously had thoughts like, "So-and-so distributed more copies of newspaper than I did," and "So-and-so did a poor job." Teacher said in Zhuan Falun that "not eliminating the attachment to competition can ... easily lead to jealousy."After coming to Australia, I enrolled in college. On the first day of class, a teacher directed the students to team up to work on an assignment, which we were supposed to complete in five weeks. My team mate was a Vietnamese girl. A few weeks later, after I had gotten to know her a bit, I started feeling that anyone would have made a better team mate than she. Why? Because we did not make any progress on our assignment at all. If I came up with an idea, she would reject it. She had a lot of her own ideas, but after she finished talking about them, she did not do any work on the assignment. It was only within the last few days that I began to realize that constantly being critical of others indicated a strong attachment to competition as well as to showing off. Didn't I always behave that way?

In our cultivation as Dafa practitioners, it is very important that we eliminate the attachment to jealousy. Attachments to jealousy and competition all originate from the selfish nature of the old cosmos. Only when we treat ourselves as Dafa particles and validate the Fa can we abandon selfishness, eliminate any unrighteous elements that originated from the old cosmos, and achieve consummation.

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